Trying to Make a Record in the Führerbunker: Mick Jagger and Keith Richards on Exile on Main St

Here's what's important about the tenth Rolling Stones album, Exile on Main St (originally released in 1972, newly reissued with the customary payload of rediscovered, historically-interesting-but-arguably-superfluous bonus material appended to its already-sprawling tracklist.)

If somebody tells you a band sounds like the Rolling Stones, it might mean they play the same artfully sloppy mix of cigarette-dangling loose-noose boogie and shooting-gallery blues the Stones achieved on Exile—but, especially these days, it could just as easily mean they're really into "Miss You" and Some Girls. But when rockers try to live like the Rolling Stones, they're almost always striving to replicate the malignant glamour of the Exile era, when the band—on the run from the cops, the tax man, and a lot of bad post-'60s juju—jetted to the South of France, threw an endless cocktail party in a rented villa that had supposedly been a Gestapo headquarters during World War II, and periodically repaired to the cellar (a space so humid that the band's guitars wouldn't stay in tune) to record songs about despair and decay.

Although "Happy" and "Tumbling Dice" remain fixtures of ⿿the band's stadium set lists, most of Exile sounds too weird and mysterious to be the work of rock's first major corporation. The production, lo-fi before lo-fi was invented, buries Mick Jagger's vocals; Richards's barking, slashing leads drop in and out of the mix; the sweetest love song is an ode to fugitive radical Angela Davis; weariness and trouble hang heavy in the air. It's the kind of album that makes cultists, inspires homage. New York noiseniks Pussy Galore covered the whole thing—on cassette!—in 1986; Liz Phair claimed to have sequenced her first record, Exile in Guyville, as a song-by-song response. And when Leo DiCaprio sends a CD of incriminating wiretaps to Matt Damon in The Departed, guess which jewel case he sticks it in.

We discussed all this with Mick and Keith, separately, in March. (Interviewing Mick about the Rolling Stones is like interviewing Mick's business manager about the Rolling Stones. Interviewing Keith Richards is exactly as awesome as you imagine it would be.)

I. MICK

Mick Jagger: Have we ever spoken before?GQ:[sort of taken aback] Um—no, we have not.

MJ: Right. Over the years, you get interviewed by lots of people, so if you speak to them, like, eight years later, you can't remember...GQ: Plus, you've been interviewed about 45,000 times.

MJ: And you've probably spoken to so many people as well.GQ: I'm guessing the number is higher on your end, though.

MJ: So we're going to chat about Exile on Main Street?

GQ: Yes. Okay. So, over the years, the Stones have made a great many brilliant albums. A great many successful albums. Yet there's a mythology surrounding Exile that is unlike anything else in the catalog. Why do you think that is?
MJ: I suppose it has to do with the story of how it was made. I remember, when it came out, it was not particularly well received, so it got to grow this sort of critical and public reputation due to these polls that they did, in music magazines like Rolling Stone. So it sort of grew as people talked about it. And when it came out, it was sort of—it was just because there were so many tracks. It was so long and hard to get into. I think it was just general laziness. Then people started to like it.

GQ: So when you're saying "how it was made," you're referring to the stories about the process?
MJ: About how we made it in the south of France and all that sort of thing. There was quite a lot of that, and it was really sort of a difficult period. I don't really understand, to be perfectly honest.

GQ: So it was a difficult period. From what I've read about the band, that sort of seems to be the consensus. It seems like for you guys, making the record was a frustrating experience.
MJ: It was frustrating, and it took quite a long period of time. A lot of the tracks were not made in the south of France. They were tracks we'd made or hadn't finished, or hadn't released on the previous album, Sticky Fingers, before we moved to France. Exile was recorded under a lot of difficult circumstances, and in what was not a very good recording place. It was a bit uphill. In retrospect, when I was forced to look at it when we were going to re-release the album, I saw that the time that we spent in the studio wasn't really that long. It didn't go on for years, and years and years. It wasn't—what was that Axl Rose album that went on for 15 years?

GQ: Chinese Democracy, yes.
MJ: [laughs] Exactly! It wasn't Chinese Democracy. It was only six or seven months. And there were so many drug problems, and we had problems getting into the United States, so it was all sort of uphill and difficult. There were all sorts of other outside forces that were trying to take up time and energy. So that definitely made it more frustrating than just doing a record. And then we were preparing for a tour—and when we did the tour and the songs, everything was fine.

GQ: Has the role of drugs in the making, or the not-making of the record, been overstated?
MJ: I don't know it was such a long time ago. It was different. It was a very druggy period for lots of people, including us. Keith particularly was being arrested quite regularly, if I remember rightly. He couldn't go to certain places, nor could I. You know I had bonds from a previous thing that were still being enforced. So that was very, very difficult. And we wanted to go to the United States and finish the record. And it was a pretty druggy period—but how it really held up the record isn't actually possible to say. You can't say that if we drank two fewer bottles of whiskey, we would have finished the track two hours faster. [laughter]

GQ: You can't speculate, like, "Oh, yeah—one bottle of whiskey probably would have gotten the job done here."
MJ: It wouldn't have had to go on 'til three in the morning—but you can't, y'know. But it was part of making the record. You know, a lot of the record was made in a big house, in a sort of big social circumstance. It wasn't made in a studio. Making records in a studio can concentrate you—in a studio, you're just going to do one thing. It makes it more finite. You've got a deadline and that sort of thing. When you move into a house and you don't have a deadline—the process, the whole thing, and all the people, it's just a longer piece of string. It's the same with film—they just don't really want to stop. It's such a good time. Why would you want to stop? You need someone to say, "OK—that's it, now." And we weren't doing that ourselves, so it probably went on a bit longer than it needed to.

GQ: So you did all this stuff in France, and then you took all of the material to Los Angeles to kind of piece it together.
MJ: Yes. And also a lot of things were recorded in England, at least half a dozen tracks.

GQ: And when you actually started piecing it together and listening to it—even in its finished form, it's this very swampy, very strange record. Listening to the basic tracks, did you feel like, "Dear God—what have we been doing for the past six or seven months?"
MJ: You always get to a point, when you're making anything, when you love it, love it, love it and then—"Oh, it's crap." It's that moment, when it's not as good as you think. Then you get a bit down about it all, and you come back when you've finished something and see that you're pleased with it. So it's a long process, really.

GQ: You've been quoted more than once over the years as saying this isn't your favorite Stones record.
MJ: [groaning] All these things come back to haunt me. I think it's because everyone was saying, "It's the greatest thing, it's the greatest thing," so I just felt like, Well, all right. You never want to deny people their favorite album. But I would always just be slightly—I was just being annoying, you know? It's not really my favorite, it's your favorite. But who knows? I don't really have a favorite. There's a lot of great Rolling Stones albums. Exile is the longest, and it's got the most songs, so you've got more to choose from. There's lots of songs we've done over the years and still do on stage, but others we've really never done on stage, too.

GQ: Were there things about it that you'd always wanted to fix, things you were unhappy with? At one point, you said that you'd always wanted to remix it and see what would happen.
MJ: Yeah, one of the things people always said about Exile was that the mix was kind of weird. But that's the thing that people fall in love with—we'll never change that mix. But one of the things I did was, I had to remaster it for this rerelease for Universal. In fact, I remastered all the Rolling Stones albums, one after the other, basically. Some of them I remastered eight, ten years before for a previous record company, and when I listened to them again, I thought some of them were great, and some of them were really not very good. And then you start analyzing again, "That sounds like a real mess. Well, I can't do anything with that, there's no bass, no vocals, it's just a mess, a disaster." And some of the mixes were just messy, there's no clarity. I love the idea of remixing some tracks, just to see what they sound like, but to be honest, I didn't remix any of these tracks for this release.

GQ: So what was it like to go back and listen to the original masters again?
MJ: I only listened to it for the sonic quality. You get drawn into the performance, but you're supposed to be listening to see if it's as good as the previous mastering. Because you're cutting for so many different platforms—the CD's got so much more clarity than the one you mastered before, because of different bitrates. Then you've got MP3 and other, better-sounding digital things. You get drawn in by certain things you've never heard, but you're not supposed to be listening to that. [laughs] Not really. What I was really involved in more, time-wise was listening to these tracks that hadn't been released before. That was the most time-consuming thing for me—the mastering was really quick.

GQ: So this new material—my understanding is that it's stuff that was recorded during the Exile era. How finished were the new tracks when you left them? What state were they in?
MJ: They weren't finished. None of them had vocals on, which is probably one of the reasons they never came out or whatever. We had so many tracks, but—this is what I said to you before—I could've finished them, but I didn't. Either I didn't have any ideas, or I couldn't be bothered or whatever—they're unwieldy in some way. They were very much like any other Rolling Stones song then or now, to be honest. You'd listen to them and you'd go, "Okay, so that needs a vocal, and that's the chorus, this is that." Some were pretty much together, and some were less together. And you just treat them if they were new, to be perfectly honest. It's always a bit odd to revisit things, but after you get used to them, it doesn't really matter if they were done last week or thirty-five, forty years ago.

GQ: It creates some interesting juxtapositions, though. You've got a forty- year-old guitar part...
MJ: Yeah, and a vocal I did recently. It just took a long time to finish. [laughs]

GQ: Now it's finally done.
MJ: It's kind of interesting, the process. It sounds a bit weird, but to be honest, if someone had sent me these tracks and told me, "You did those two years ago"—the process is exactly the same. It's not the best way of writing songs. My favorite way of writing songs is to have the melody and at least most of the lyrics while the music's there, but sometimes it happens that it isn't like that, and a lot of people work like that, that sometimes you have to write to a finished track. It happens like that and you just do it.

GQ: Did listening to the tracks again bring back memories for you, of that time?
MJ: A lot of times, I remembered where they were done or where I was sitting. And some of them I just didn't remember at all. I was playing guitar or something, and I don't remember any of it. Where was that recorded? So I tried to find out where it was recorded and when. They weren't all recorded in the same place. Some of them I really remembered, but some I didn't remember at all. Some of them were really together—maybe the one you've heard, it was called "Plundered my Soul," that was perfect, you didn't have to edit, it was all perfect. Some of the others were much more loose jams.

GQ: But given that it was such a turbulent time for the band, and for you too, going back to it must've been—
MJ: There's all this ancient gossip, but then when you actually hear it, you go, "That was really well-played. It doesn't sound like we were going through any traumatic moments. What's all that bollocks? Everybody is perfectly in tune. One, two, three—you hear the count and off you go." And it's done. It seems like the band was playing pretty well even though it was a turbulent time.

GQ: Post-Exile, it seems like the Stones became a much more professional operation, in terms of touring and recording.
MJ: See, I think the watershed time for that, the dawn of professionalism, was the 1969 tour, even though it had a really bad ending, ultimately. That was, you know, the dawn of arena tours and organized sounds and lights and all that sort of thing, and it just got more and more professional as it went along, really. Professional being one way of putting it. It was a much more organized touring business. The recording studio part of it was to be honest very similar to any recording studio. Sometimes the studio albums were really organized, and some less so. But the touring part of it I guess got to be more and more organized from '69 onwards.

GQ: But was that in any way a response to the frustration of the Exile experience, where you spent a lot of time waiting for people to turn up and things like that?
MJ: That sort of thing is really a result, to some extent, of doing it in someone's house, you know. Bigger Bang was done in a house as well, more or less. But after that we didn't record in houses.

GQ: Clearly, that was not the most efficient way of doing things.
MJ: I don't know that we deliberately didn't record in houses again. But after that, we went into studios more, I think. I don't think we recorded in a house with that mobile unit we had after that again.

GQ: There are a lot of bootlegs and outtakes from the Exile period floating around. Is there stuff on this reissue that fans who've sought out the bootleg material will have heard?
MJ: There are a lot of tracks floating around, but not with the current vocals on them, because they didn't exist. We tried to use tracks that hadn't been so heavily bootlegged. I did find one of the tracks, "Aladdin Story"—that was actually recorded note-for-note by some other band. I was really surprised to find this outtake—someone got the bootleg and they just recorded it. I can't remember the name of the band. [It was Death in Vegas.]

GQ: What it sounds like you're saying is that to some extent, the legend surrounding this record has been exaggerated. People have made too much of it.
MJ: I'm not saying people have made too much of it. We made this documentary film about the making of Exile, and I had to sort of think it through, what I thought the story was, to tell the director what I think it was. What did it entail, when was it really, which time period does it really encompass. I think it was very involved. But to say it was all difficult is bullshit. It wasn't difficult. It was full of mad activity, creativity. Yeah, there was outside trouble of all different nature, it was a time of change—but what time isn't? People getting married, like me, other people having loads of children. A lot of things happened. It was like a three-year period, you know? It started when Exile—the first track on Exile, "Loving Cup"—when that was done in London, in the end of 1969, so that's why I said that's when Exile begins for me, and it goes on until 1972 when it's finished, or whenever the last date in the mixing was, that's the end of Exile because everything after that isn't Exile. So that was a long period, and loads of stuff happened, and it wasn't all bad. Some of it was fantastic. It was very full of incident, but it wasn't all angst, when you see the photographs everybody's having a wonderful time. You can paint it as this degrading experience, but it really doesn't look like that when you look at it. There were definite moments of ailment and despondency, but it really wasn't like that when you look at the footage, the pictures, the things that people said, the interviews they gave. You might focus in on a snapshot period, of maybe two months, and say that was a bit difficult. But I'm looking at it from a three-year perspective.

GQ: And in any three-year period...
MJ: A lot happens to people in three years, you know, and it's not all bad. All kinds of stuff! It's kind of interesting. It's not correct to say that it's exaggerated, but it's much more involved than just, sort of, "They took a lot of drugs, and it was a difficult record to make." I don't think it's correct. For me, it's like a bullshit sort of headline in the tabloids, you know what I mean? It's much more complicated than, "Oh, they were out of it, and ad a hard time making up songs."

GQ: You had just gotten married when you started making this record.
MJ: Yeah, during the making of the record, right at the beginning of the French part of it. And then Keith had, I think, two children in this period.

GQ: That's probably part of it too—the fact that you were suddenly men with wives and families probably complicated things as much as the debauchery did.
MJ: Yeah, it was a growing-up thing. I think Mick Taylor also had a baby at this point. So when you saw a picture, it was full of children and families and so on, in this recording situation, which we'd never had before. It was not at all like the life of the Rolling Stones to have children—it was a completely new experience. So that's all very different, you know, and much more mature, if you want.

GQ: Were there moments of joy? Has that been underreported?
MJ: I think that's what I'm trying to say. Not using that word, it's a bit [mockingly] "A joyous experience!" But, definitely, there were those moments. There were at least three children being born during this period. So that was very lovely, and different, at that time. It was a wonderful period, a very creative period, but it also had its problems, some of them practical, some personal, and so on.

GQ: My sense is that it was not the greatest period, in terms of your relationship with Keith.
MJ: I think the Keith relationship thing wasn't bad at all.

GQ: Really?
MJ: Yeah, it was fine. I don't think it was an issue here. Keith might tell you differently, but I mean, as far as I could see—obviously we had disagreements about the songs, but that was normal. If you all think exactly the same, that's not how any band works, as far as I can see. What I can see, from looking at all this stuff, is that the biggest problems were a change of management, and problems with visas and general kind of practical problems. Tax problems, money problems due to all these previous things that had gone on that I don't really want to elaborate on. Too boring. But there was an accumulation of practical problems that had to be constantly dealt with, and my experience is when you're wrangled with people, with the tax people, it takes an enormous amount of energy.

GQ: And pulls you away from the creative process.
MJ: Yeah, it pulls you away from the creative process. And it's just very tiring and annoying and constantly invading your creative space to get all this together, and getting a tour on. I think we were touring with a tour manager so a lot of new things were going on, personnel and all that. So it was a time of change, a lot of changes.

GQ: The one thing that keeps coming up is that this ended up being a record about the end of the Sixties, or the hangover from the Sixties. As you were writing this, were you thinking about that. Were you looking back on the era you had been through, personally or in a larger sense?
MJ: I don't think you can do that when you're making music, I don't think any of that is conscious. I really can't see it. Especially as it straddles such a long period. The only sort of slightly, vaguely conscious decision that we could've made is that it was going to be quite a tough-sounding album. Not too much sentimentality or ballads or anything like that. In fact, there aren't any ballads. There's no soft edges about Exile on Main Street. Even the slow songs—"Loving Cup" is kind of getting there, but it's not "Angie." "Shine a Light" is very tough. It's a very tough record. I don't think that speaks to anything historical, or letting-go-of-a-decade or anything like that. I don't think we thought because it's in the seventies, it's got to be different. I certainly don't remember that. But there's an inherent feeling that it's sort of tough and hard.

GQ: Yeah, and it's regrouping into the sound of just a band in a room.
MJ: Yeah, up to a point, although you've got quite a lot of keyboards and you've got horns and stuff. And you've got background vocal girls, which you didn't have much on the Sticky Fingers record, I think I'm right in saying. So you do have a lot of additional musicians actually live in the studio, rather than calling them up and having them overdub in a couple of days, they're all hanging around the whole time, so they're very involved in it. You have a lot of people, two or three people, two horn plays, then you have the overdubbed background vocals and so on. It's a different lineup.

GQ: Having gone through this process, remastering and putting in the new songs, do you feel differently about it?
MJ: Well, I certainly know a lot more about it [laughs]. I can speak about it for hours and bore everybody to death.

GQ: It's not boring! People cannot get enough information about this record.
MJ: I can bore people at the breakfast table about what I had to do on it. I know a lot about it, and I kind of appreciate it more. I can see the difficulties easier, but I can also see that some of it was easy and simple to do. It wasn't all uphill at all, by any means. I can tell, because I can listen to it and say, "That was only two takes." How difficult could that have been? So the angst and all that is bullshit. The angst part of it is hard to find. You can only find that in people's stories, you can find some of it in the film footage, but you can't find it when you're actually listening. But I know a lot more about it. I could write my thesis on it, if necessary.

GQ: Everybody goes to that dirty basement once in a while. It's the most famous dirty, sweaty basement in the history of rock. So, okay. The Rolling Stones have made a great many brilliant records, and a great many successful records—but Exile has a mythology surrounding it that nothing else in the catalog really has. Why do you think that is?
KR: It's probably a combination of things. It was the first double album that we put out. There were so many firsts for the band—going abroad to record, and ending up in the basement studio of my house, as it turned out. The basement of my house was the only place we could fucking find. I think there's an atmosphere about it that has to do with that dirty, dark, dusty basement. I think the sound of that room is imprinted all over it.

GQ: What do you remember about making the album?
KR: I remember it was like trying to make a record in the Führerbunker. It was that sort of feeling you know—it was very Germanic down there for some reason. Swastikas on the staircase. And also, like all basements, it had never been used for anything. So basically it was a dirt floor and some concrete. If somebody got lost, there'd be a little trail of dust in the darkness.

GQ: Was it kind of like a wine cellar?
KR: It was a labyrinth, in actual fact. It was a concrete labyrinth, subdivided here and there, and we would go around testing to see which one had the best echo or was the best sound for a particular instrument. That sort of thing. But it was also sort of like the netherworld. Upstairs it was fantastic. Like Versailles. The south of France in the summer—la, la, la. Beautiful. Who could ask for anything more? But down there, it was another thing. It was Dante's Inferno.

GQ: Do you remember it as a good time, for yourself and for the band?
KR: Yeah I do. And always have. My feeling about it is this was really when the band stepped up to the plate. We'd made some great albums previously to that, but it was like, Now you're under the gun. Can you do this out of a normal environment? Outside of a studio? Not being in your own country? Can you actually pull this one off? It was a test. Being taken out of an environment that you know very well, and being told, "Now do it here!" These were incredibly difficult conditions to work in, and the guys stuck to it. That's one of the things about the record that is of lasting memory for me, basically—for the band, it was into the trenches, and we did it.

GQ: There were also a lot of external factors that complicated things, right?
KR: I was living on top of the factory. It saved the trips to parties—you just went upstairs! You didn't have to worry about going from the studio and saying, "Where are we going to hang now?" You went upstairs and there it was—a great French villa, people are passing by, and everybody's jolly. It's a breath of fresh air, to go up and have a drink. It was a weird feeling going up from the basement and into this very beautiful sort of villa. It was a piece of work, that place.

GQ: Was there a perpetual party going on up there?

KR: Pretty much. There were people passing through, Gram Parsons was there for a month or so. Robert Fraser. A lot of friends from England. Why not? Hey, come down. There was constant traffic.

GQ: Why didn't Parsons play on the record? It seems like it could have happened, given the free-flowing atmosphere you're describing.
KR: He'd be playing upstairs. When I wasn't in the studio, Mick and I would be playing with Gram. I think Gram really did not want to intrude. I think he really deliberately didn't want to push himself forward in any way as being part of the record. I think he just wanted to watch how we did it and how we were going to get out of this thing. I think it was just a matter of respect, really. He didn't think it was his place, let's put it that way. Gram wasn't that way. I think the only way it could have happened is if we said, "Hey, Gram. We need another guitar here." But Gram's a gentleman, and he saw we knew what we were doing and didn't want to be distracted. I think he just read it right.

GQ: Mick has said Exile is not his favorite of the Stones records. You've always spoken really highly of it.
KR: Everybody has different tastes. I'm not saying it's my favorite, either. I just think that it's unique and that it stands the test of time damn well. And I also think Mick and I were right to stick to our guns and insist that it was a double album. We had a lot of hassles with the record company, because, of course, they wanted a single album, so to force them to do a double took endless sort of ranting and raving.

GQ: It's not cost-effective to put out a double album, I assume.
KR: Quite right. In the beginning, though sales were very good, it was nothing compared to a single album. But over the years, it certainly proved itself. And I always had a feeling about that record. I mean, we had no particular singles on it—we pulled some off, but there wasn't a "Brown Sugar" or "Honky Tonk Women." It was just sort of, We're exiled, baby, and this is how it goes.

GQ: The myth surrounding the making of the record—has that been exaggerated?
KR: Probably ten percent of whatever you heard is anywhere near it—all that debauchery and that kind of crap. We didn't have time! [laughs] We were fucking making a record. We were turning out two or three tracks a night sometimes. There was little time for debauchery. I'm not saying it never, never went on. But we were working.

GQ: So this notion that sort of drugs were part of the process...
KR: Of course they bloody well were! Are you kidding me? That was normal fuel. Of course drugs were around.

GQ: You've said the stuff you produced during this period wouldn't have been better if you were straight.
KR: No. I don't think it would make any difference. Would Charlie Parker had played better if he hadn't done the stuff? It's like, what came first, the chicken or the egg, honey?

GQ: I guess so. Do you think it would have been worse, in a way? Was there something drugs allowed you to access that you wouldn't have been able to get to otherwise?
KR: No. It felt natural then. And it still does. Whatever I was taking then or going through felt right. And after all, nobody else can judge me except me.

GQ: Sure. I'm just curious about it.
KR: Of course you are. [laughs]

GQ: I think that's why most people are curious about this. We'll never live anything like that period.
KR: You won't know what you missed.

GQ: I guess not.
KR: But it's not for everybody. It's not try-this-at-home shit.

GQ: What are the drawbacks of recording in a space like that? I know you've said Jimmy Miller is the guy who deserves a medal for producing a record under these conditions.
KR: Absolutely. Jimmy did an incredible job, especially under those circumstances. We had no control room. We had a mobile [recording] truck outside the front door. So every time we had a playback, it was like a ritual. And after a while you'd be down in the basement and say, "Do you want to hear that back," and we'd all look at each other and say, "Nah." We couldn't take the stairs anymore. So we'd say to Jimmy, "What are you think?" And he'd say, "I think it's a good one," and they'd say, "OK," and then you'd tramp up the stairs and check it out. It was a weird way of making a record, but it proved it can be done almost anywhere. It's much easier these days, actually. Given the equipment that was available in 1971, it was quite a feat.
⿿GQ: Anybody can make a record in a house on a laptop these days.
KR: I've done several myself. But in those days, it was like the pyramids.

GQ: A lot of the basic tracks were recorded in the South of France, but they were actually finished in L.A. My sense is the France stuff was you and the Los Angeles stuff was Mick. I know that's a simplification, but...
KR: It is an incredible simplification. In those days, you couldn't really split apart who did what. We were both incredibly involved in laying down the tracks. And by the time we got to L.A., we kind of already knew what we wanted. We knew the record so well by the time we went in to do the over-dubs. So I can't go with any of the "This is Mick's and that was Keith's" bullshit. When we made records, Mick and I were tight.

GQ: Really? Even on this one? Because everything I've heard is that you and Mick had problems.
KR: Mick and I got along fine. We started to have problems in the '80s. World War Three—that's another story.

GQ: We're cutting through the myths here, Keith. We're getting to the facts.
KR: Like a knife through butter, baby.

GQ: Because what I've read is that he was a little bit absent, because he has other things going on in his life. He was married, he was having a kid, and that created some tension between you guys...
KR: No, not really. People read so many things into that. But my memory of the basement is of Mick being very, very intent and involved. It was the first time I let him play guitar! And once Mick and I get into making a record, we get very into it. We forget who we are, even. When Mick and I work, we really do work, and all the personality shit sort of goes out the window.

GQ: So the things you don't get along over don't tend to be musical things.
KR: Yeah but a lot of that tension is why we work together and a lot of the stuff that we've done works well. You know, it's an ongoing relationship. I just sent Charlie a note saying, "Charlie, what's Mick doing? Should I put an available ad in Jazz News or something, like, 'Guitar player available.'" I feel a bit itchy, you know. It's been a couple years. There's something inside you that just starts to scratch.

GQ: Can we talk about the new stuff? There are a lot of people who think this record is perfect. Maybe the mix was muddy, maybe the vocals were low—but there are people who love that and consider it a perfect object. Why go back and change it?
KR: On the actual record there's nothing changed at all. The new tracks, there are a few things done—I remember brushing on an acoustic guitar on one of them, because on the original, I apparently stopped playing halfway through. [laughs] And I finished off that bit. After 30 or 40 years.

GQ: Why didn't the other tracks get finished back then?
KR: We got as far as a double album, and some things you just chop off. We've done it I think with every album we've ever made. And a lot of those things get picked up again and they end up on the next album. I think a lot of the things on Goats Head Soup were ideas that came off Exile on Main St. But these ones were just forgotten. It's really nice to have a big, um, can. Things that you'd forgotten about. "Start Me Up" was one of them—that was 5 years old when we found it. The whole track. We'd forgotten we'd done it. [laughter] It's interesting when they say, "Let's see what's in the can," because you never know.

GQ: Did it take you back, listening to these old master tapes again? Was it a time-machine sensation?
KR: Yeah, a time machine, or time warp. When I'm listening to that stuff, I'm suddenly in the basement. It's more like time travel. We're getting close to Einstein here.

GQ: Was there anything that you heard that made you say, "I can't believe that's me playing that?"
KR: Oh, that happens quite a lot. I still don't know how I did "Sympathy for the Devil." I've never been able to replicate it or figure it out. Sometimes you just take off. You wait for those moments. And you don't really know how the hell you did it.

GQ: Another thing people say about this record is that it's about the hangover from the '60s. The decade is over, and you're counting up the bodies and sorting out the consequences.
KR: In 1971, I certainly wasn't thinking, "Oh, it's a new page" or "The '60s are over." Because the '60s were very different at the beginning than they were at the end. I had no sense of that decade in that way. I suppose in hindsight, you can see certain formations and changes in society—they're discernible. But so what? The 50s were incredibly different at the beginning than they were at the end. I remember '51 and it was a lot different than '59. So maybe some decades have that acceleration on, and others, not so much. I mean, we've had a lot of acceleration now. Technology is just incredible. God knows if we'll survive it.

GQ: Yeah, I was wondering about that. Can't I just get the new Exile beamed directly into my head?
KR: Yeah. "Can I just think it, and it's there?" Pow!

GQ: What does this album mean to you?
KR: We survived. It was make or break, that record. If we couldn't have pulled it off, I don't know what would have happened. It was done because it had to be done. And almost in a sense of desperationm because it had to work. And at the same time, we knew we were stepping out on a limb. And then I think, "Hey, the Stones put out 'Little Red Rooster' in the '60s." Straight up country blues, and we got it to #1. Because we felt we owed it to where we learned our music. It was a crazy move to make then. So Exile was just another example of that sort of thing we do at times. We should do it more often. I'll talk to Mick about it. I'll jot it down.

GQ: Exile is a tribute to the people you learned from, too. Classic American music. "Stop Breakin' Down" is a Robert Johnson cover. "Shake Your Hips" is Slim Harpo.
KR: There was a mixture of American music, yeah. Because the Stones stuff always is. And I can understand that maybe because it was done in France—we did miss America, and it gave us a chance to digest and play some of the things we'd learned in America.

GQ: And the cover art is from Robert Frank's The Americans.
KR: I did the inside.

GQ: You mean the inside photos? What did you do?
KR: I said just use the track lists that we use in the studio. That was my input.

GQ: Was that your handwriting, on those set lists?
KR: Mine, or Mick's.